


Crawl

by aerialiste



Series: Galveston [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon What Canon, Charlie Lives, Fallen Angels, First Time, Galveston Island, Human Castiel, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Oral Sex, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Veterinarian Castiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 13:33:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4265076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerialiste/pseuds/aerialiste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s been almost four years since Castiel left Kansas; he'd eventually settled in an island town where he has a job, a house, and a life without the Winchesters. Every winter, Dean drives down to the coast to see him.</p><p>“I shoot guns. I beat up monsters. I fix <em>cars</em>, Cas.”</p><p>“I guess I should have done something worse to yours than hide the distributor cap, then.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crawl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wobblesome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wobblesome/gifts).



> My prompt was "ocean." [Now! with 100 percent more [pretty beachy picspam](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com/post/123186048621/crawl)! for your tumblr needs.]

_My place is placeless, a trace  
of the traceless. Neither body or soul._

_I belong to the beloved, have seen the two  
worlds as one and that one call to and know,_

_first, last, outer, inner, only that  
breath breathing human being._

جلالالدین محمد رومی

 _Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, tr. Coleman Barks_

•

None of this, Dean thought, was even supposed to be happening.

Him driving down a two-lane in the Impala, exhausted and vaguely irritable: that part was familiar enough. He wouldn’t have taken the I-45 even under duress, because he hated the interstate on principle; though he didn’t want to admit it, Baby had also never done well on them before, but especially now, with the other cars zipping past at indecent Texas speeds—

 _Once she gets going she’s great_ , Dean reasoned defensively. Just, the zero-to-fifty part was increasingly tough. It was fine; he liked the old three-digit highways better. If he stops to stretch and piss and poke around in the underbrush, no one cares, no one’s there to see.

He’d lost his last cassette; it had snapped in the player outside Lufkin, whirring pointlessly, the tape too damaged from heat and cold and time to keep from stretching out and wrapping around the capstan and then popping with an audible snap. He’d pulled over to try to dig the plastic shell out with the knife he still stuck in the side of his boot every morning, but no dice. He’d have to take off the front of the dash once he got to Cas’s place.

Because Cas had a place, now. His own place. This was at least one of the things that never should have happened, but somehow had.

Another is that Dean’s thirty-nine, and turning forty in a few days. That, he never saw coming.

Honestly he'd never thought any of them would see the other side of thirty-five—or however old Cas considered himself—but there they all were, needing dental coverage and often unable to finish beers they’d opened hours before. Charlie liked to rinse her hair in it, after it went flat—thank god Sam had finally cut his to a length Dean considered approaching reasonable. Back in the day, Dean was sure they’d have had to sacrifice beer straight out of the bottle. If Charlie didn't want it, he sometimes stuck the lid back on and used it in barbecue sauce the next day, or the day after. That’s what they’d become. People who couldn’t finish beers.

He shifted in his seat, restless and aching from having driven through the night. Of course he should have stopped halfway, somewhere in Oklahoma, and had promised both of them he would, but of course he hadn’t, and was therefore ignoring their calls. Sam, as always, had offered to come; but Dean said no, stay there and geek out with Charlie, keep her company—no need to spend what amounted to three days in the Impala. Sam never protested.

Charlie had moved in permanently once Sam left, though she’d already been there so often she had her own room and had commandeered most of the library with her computer stuff. Dean knew that she knew how grateful he’d been, not to be living there alone, though he also felt an inexplicable relief when she left for one of her week-long “civilization errands,” as she called them, and the bunker fell quieter than quiet. But he also liked it when Sam turned up every year for his winter break, from just before Christmas until just after New Year’s. The three of them littered the war room with takeout boxes and shotgunned Netflix, and he got to break out the Belgian iron and make pecan waffles with blueberry syrup, and sweet potato homefries and a bunch of other stuff that was silly to cook when it was just him and Charlie, since the two of them could go for days without more than a grunt (Dean) or a brief kiss to the top of the head in passing (Charlie) (and often, admittedly, Dean).

And after Christmas, every January for the last three years, whether he felt like it or didn’t, he drove down to see Castiel—former seraph of the Lord, very briefly God, and once his best friend in the world, now working part-time as a veterinary technician in Galveston and seeking revelation, if at all, from clumps of seaweed and broken angel-wing shells.

He had started to get on the I-10 as usual, but this year he hesitated, then decided to keep going south. Driving through Houston had been a gut-churning nightmare every time, and the Bolivar ferry, according to the website, was free. Apparently you didn’t even have to wait that long for it. He’d always wanted to see Anahuac—maybe he could talk Cas into going out there for a day. Something different. No need to do the same thing every time.

It turned out that even without the tape deck he could still play all the songs from _Zep III_ in his head, in order. He wondered when that had happened, what other valuable space was being taken up along with the lyrics to “Gallows Pole,” then “Tangerine,” cracking the window despite the early morning humid chill, not really singing, just kind of talking under his breath, not letting himself hear the words, _and now a thousand years between, thinking how it used to be_ , sometimes you just have to keep moving so it doesn’t catch up with you.

•

Both Dean and Sam had tried to talk Cas out of it when he decided to leave, although to be fair, it wasn’t like he had ever even really been there. Dean had seen him in the bunker a grand total of half a dozen times, and since one of those times he’d been beating the living shit out of Cas, it wasn’t hard to imagine why he didn’t have fond memories of the place.

“It’s not that, Dean,” he’d said, his expression still impossibly innocent. How, Dean had thought in frustration, how after _everything_ could the guy still be _that_ fucking big-eyed. He’d never liked the thought of Cas trying to fend for himself and he liked it even less now, now that he was totally, irreversibly human, and still basically a six-foot baby.

“Come on, man, you don’t have to—” _lie about it_ , he’d started to say, then stopped, suddenly curious. “Cas, can you even tell a lie?”

He’d looked away, fidgeting and clearly uncomfortable, which pretty much made what he was about to say…obvious. “Not exactly, no. Not what you’d consider a good one, anyway. I can manage to stay silent, but it—it hurts.”

They’d been in the library, Dean pacing while Cas sat with his hands folded, refusing to listen to reason, his posture relaxed even as he persisted in being a stubborn son of a bitch.

“If you can’t even lie, how are you going to do this on your own? I don’t—what if you—”

 _Do you not remember April_ , he wanted to shout. _Do you not remember getting suckered by Crowley, and by Metatron, and—for god’s sake, Cas,_ us, _you got roped in by_ us _—_

Sam had given up an hour earlier, throwing up his hands and saying, “Dean, if he doesn’t _want_ to be here—” at which point Charlie had mercifully stuck her head in claiming to need help, and dragged Sam to town for some mysterious supplies Dean was pretty sure they didn’t actually need, presumably so that he could huff and bluster and raise his voice while he and Cas argued, which wasn’t so much an argument as Dean trying to get Cas to stay without actually having to say the word “stay,” much less the word “please.”

Finally Dean had sat down in one of the wooden chairs so hard that it skidded backward across the floor, mostly so he wouldn’t grab Cas by the lapels and shake him until his teeth rattled.

“I don’t know what else to say to you, man,” he admitted, not looking up, not liking the way his voice tried to waver and he had to tighten his diaphragm and push it through his throat to get it out. He was tougher than this now, after—after everything; he should know better.

“I never want to fight with you, Dean. And I don’t want to fight now, not about this.”

“We’re not—” Dean made himself drop his voice, aware that he was on the verge of shouting. “We’re not fighting, okay. We’re just—I just—”

Not going to say it. Not going to say it. _I don’t want you to go._ Not going to say it.

“ _Dean_ ,” and this was the part he hated, when Cas softened and his eyes had probably turned into fucking pools of _sympathy_ as he reached a hand across the table—

Dean crossed his arms, crossed one knee over the other, refused to look up.

“This is not about—” Cas paused, pulling his hand back and sticking it awkwardly into the pocket of his gray heather hoodie (what the fuck, why had Sam given him _another_ hoodie, he looked utterly defenseless in that thing). “This is not about _you_. You can’t—Dean, I haven’t had room for my own thoughts in so long. Perhaps I never have. It’s been so loud in my mind. I don’t know if you can imagine—maybe you can’t.”

He’d stood up as if to leave which made Dean’s heart squeeze down into a small damp ball, but he didn’t walk away, just turned to the bookcase, fingertips drifting across spines, the edges of shelves, as if he were trying to reassure himself. Dean had noticed that about Cas, now; he always had to be touching things, maybe to see if they were real, or if he still were.

Abruptly he turned and sat back down, holding a book he’d apparently chosen at random, a little too tightly. He took a breath and looked down at its heavy embossed cover.

“You used to call it angel radio, and that wasn’t wrong. Most of the time, though, it wasn’t even tuned to anything, it was just constant…static. Just interference drowning out everything, always. And gaps of time—so many gaps, I don’t know if they—I don’t think I’ll ever know how many times Naomi or someone of her rank wiped my memory.”

Dean swallowed. Cas had told them this part already, but he still tried not to think about it.

Cas opened the book, sniffing its pages unselfconsciously. He always smelled books right when he opened them, and Dean had never wanted to draw this idiosyncrasy to his attention, in case he stopped. “You know, I always thought I’d be lonely, without the Host? Without the voices of my family? But it’s so quiet, Dean. So, so silent. I don’t miss it at all. It’s beautiful, that hush, like the morning after a heavy snow.”

(And Cas knew what snow was like, too, now—knew what it felt like to have it stuffed down the back of your jacket by Sam, who was _that_ asshole; what it was like to pack it in your hands and grind it into your friends’ faces, your bare hands hurting from the cold; what it was like to eat snow ice cream, beaten with honey and whipping cream and vanilla. “Cas, what are you—give it _here_ , you can’t just eat _honey_ by _itself_ , that’s not, we don’t—” and Sam bent over laughing at them as Dean tried to wrestle the little plastic bear away from him without getting honey everywhere, Cas apparently absorbed in drizzling the golden syrup along his index finger in a zigzag ribbon and then licking it off again—)

“You _want_ that,” Dean said, again more gruffly than he meant to, just because he had to roughen his voice to get it out at all. “You _want_ to be alone.”

Cas finally placed the book on the table and looked up at him. As an angel, this would have been the precise moment when his head would have tipped to one side, in curiosity. Now, he studied Dean directly, his eyes filled with emotion, and the normalcy—the _humanity_ of this, unnerved him worse than anything. “Yes. I want silence. I want peace. And I want you to come see me—I want you _both_ to come see me, and Charlie, too—as often as you can, later. But I need this, Dean. I know you don’t understand, but it’s the same way I needed to stay in Purgatory, after you left. I have—things to think about, things to put back together inside myself. I can’t do it without—without a lot of empty time. Without spaciousness.”

Dean scrubbed his hands across his face and into his hair, pulling on it and exhaling, which they both knew meant the argument was over, and Cas had—as always—won. He groaned. 

“Fine. Fuck it. You must’ve got this from watching Sam. You’re both so—you both just do whatever you want, nothing I ever say has ever made a bit of difference, you’re like teenagers. Just—can you _text_ , or something, at least at first? If you don’t want us to write back, or call you or whatever, that’s fine. But just—check in with Charlie every day for a while? Cause how else am—how else are we gonna know if you’re in trouble this time?”

Part of the whole used-to-be-another-species thing that Cas would forever retain, Dean guessed, would be that when he smiled it was always like a goddamned sunrise.

“Of course, Dean,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the table, slightly too close, and making a visible effort not to touch him.

Dean closed his eyes so Cas wouldn’t see him rolling them. _The fallen leader of Heaven’s armies wandering around the world, invading people’s personal space like a fucking golden retriever. Like a big human Teletubby_ , Dean thought. _Yeah. This is gonna go real, real well_.

To everyone’s surprise, it actually had.

•

Cas had, as per his promise, checked in with one of them every day for a while, a couple of months in fact, as he decided where he wanted to live and what he wanted to do. He’d worked the first summer as a gardener at a Zen monastery in New Mexico, where they had month-long silent retreats, which Cas said he loved, though he still texted illicitly from a shed somewhere on the property; he’d learned how to cook there and been promoted to something called a fukuten, which Dean thought sounded like a really tough-to-kill monster. He had shaved his head, and texted a picture of himself in black robes. None of them could recognize him; all the monks kind of looked alike, genderless and blurry.

But then he’d decided he didn’t want to be a monk, too many rules, and he’d hit the road again, calling them from places like Okefenokee, very enthusiastic about armadillos and opossums; or Hermosilla, texting Charlie pictures of different kinds of scorpions, which he’d discovered glowed green under black light, asking her to look up what kind they were.

In the end, other than a long scary week when he was utterly enamoured of New Orleans, and Sam had practically had to throw Dean in the dungeon to keep him from going after him, Cas had made, Dean had to admit however grudgingly, some reasonable decisions.

First of all, he decided to settle in Galveston, because he liked that it was “dilapidated.”

Dean had been in the motor pool working on Sam’s piece-of-shit Civic, and this word caught him off guard; he fumbled the socket extension, and instead of falling through to the concrete, it rolled to the edge of the plastic undercarriage shield and stuck there. He dropped his head briefly on his arm, then gave up, wiping sweat off his forehead with his shirtsleeve and walking away from the half-disassembled engine bay, squinting into the light from the open garage door. He leaned up against its edge, staring blankly down at the gravel for a long minute, eventually realizing that Cas was politely waiting for him to say something.

“Um, sorry. Dilapidated?”

“Yes, it’s—it’s suffered, this town. It’s been battered, and lost things, and it’s never going to come back quite the same way, or maybe ever. I like that. I like that it’s broken.”

“That’s not why most people like a place, Cas.”

Cas didn’t reply right away, mulling this over before arriving at his conclusion: “Well, I’m not people.”

Dean had just taken a swig from his travel mug of cold coffee and it nearly came right back up. “What the hell? You’re close enough! Not people—what gave you get that idea?”

“Rowena said—”

“—okay you know what, I take it back, I don’t wanna know. Cas, listen to me: you’re people, alright. Remember when you got your first cold, back here at the bunker—remember that?”

Cas didn’t laugh, as Dean had kind of hoped he would. Apparently the memory was still too vivid. There was a pained silence.

“Anyone,” Dean continued firmly, “who’s ever had that bad of a head cold? Is people. End of discussion.”

“Then what kind of places are _people_ supposed to like,” Cas asked, very softly, and Dean chose to ignore that.

“I dunno—architecture, I guess. Pretty houses, neighborhoods. Lawns,” he said, suddenly losing confidence, looking out across the unkempt scrub and bracken of god knows how many acres, land he and Sam had never done a damn thing with besides go out once in an increasingly rare while and shoot some quail, mostly to keep them from overrunning the place. He’d seen deer, many times, very early in the mornings, and had once had held his breath watching a small herd of elk pick their way across the yellowed grass—

 _Lawns. Really, Winchester?_ Lawns. _You really think a former angel of the fucking—_

“This place is very beautiful, Dean,” Cas said firmly, using that _tone_ ; and Dean understood this was it, this would be where Cas would stay. “It has water, and sand, and many fish. And birds. And sea turtles. And it’s not a big city—it’s very small, and inexpensive. I like it. I’ve already signed up for classes.”

This time the coffee definitely would have come back up, but Dean had just finished slinging the last of it off into the weeds next to the bunker. “Classes. You’re— _classes_.”

“Yes,” and now Cas couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice, “Charlie helped me with papers to convince the admissions office that I have a GED, just as you do, and I’m starting at Galveston College in the second summer session—Dean, it’s only two years of training, less time if I am able to skip requirements, until I can be a veterinary surgical assistant.”

This was worse than a Hell’s Angel on a moped; this was more like Stephen Hawking in freshman pre-algebra, pretending to take notes on a textbook he’d written in third grade.

“That’s what you want to do? I mean, there’s going to be—it’s _surgery_ , Cas, there’ll be cutting and blood and, and stuff.” Before he even got halfway through that sentence, Dean thought about all the times he’d seen Cas with a blade in his hand, flipping it backward deftly, slicing unhesitating into his own skin, _always happy to bleed for the Winchesters—_

“This time I’ll be helping, Dean,” and he could hear it, in his voice, something like relief. “I’ve been volunteering at the animal shelter and at the end of a day, no matter what’s happened, I’ve _done_ something. Made a complete action, started and finished a thing, no loose ends. Something I can think back on when I come home and take off my scrubs”— _scrubs_ , Dean had no idea where to put that mental image so he just slid it off somewhere to the side with a thousand scorching others of Cas in a tattered filthy hospital outfit, scraggle-bearded, eyes hollow with self-recrimination, shoving him backward, rejecting him with all his strength—“I can think: I did this thing, and it stayed done, and it helped. I wrapped and autoclaved a hundred surgical packs; or, we did twenty spay-and-neuters; or, a puppy stopped breathing under anaesthetic and I massaged its chest until it breathed again.”

Dean let out his own breath. “You’ve done that?”

Cas laughed, an unpitched huffing sound, and Dean wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to it, even though he remembered it, sort of, from a weird couple of days with Jimmy Novak.

“I help something not die every day.”

Dean couldn’t argue with that.

•

It was late morning, close to eleven by the time he drove off the ferry and onto the island’s beat-up little residential streets. Cas was right; Galveston had a spent, weary feeling to it, shabby and tattered around the edges, a little bit Blanche DuBois; but after a couple of visits Dean thought he’d started to see the appeal. You didn’t have to dress up, pony up, man up, put up or shut up—the island never made you feel like you weren’t good enough.

Maybe that was part of it, for Cas: a place so imperfect didn’t underscore the loss of his own kinds of perfection. Sand drifted into doorways and lined window frames, blew everywhere from burst plastic bags; buildings were stained with high water marks from storm surges; anything painted was peeling, and all the palmettos were shaggy and unkempt. It was a comfortable kind of town, one where you could go a long while without shaving.

Dean always changed his mind about the appeal, though, as soon as he turned onto Seawall and saw the Gulf: choppy, today, and a muddy cocoa brown. The damp gray sand was dotted with tangled clumps of maroon seaweed, lit irregularly by the sun from behind scattered clouds. It was warm, he guessed, by Kansas-in-winter standards anyway, probably in the low sixties, but the water looked disgusting and he could never figure out how Cas swam in it—which he did, by his own admission, every day from the end of February until mid-November. Cas apparently just pined during December and January.

He slowed down on the gravel, nearing the end of East Beach and still not sure how Cas had managed to get a place out here. The other houses were all clearly vacation homes, new, built after the last hurricane and worth half-a-million each, easy. But out past the very last new McMansion, out where tidewater slopped up ankle-deep, Cas had somehow sweet-talked his way into a decrepit rental, a shack on stilts, all garish bright-blue peeling paint and silvered exposed wood.

Dean couldn’t even drive the last quarter-mile, didn’t want to come out in the morning and find Baby up to her axles in sand; he pulled over at the end of the gravel and turned off the ignition, debating whether to get his stuff now or later. He settled for later, and kept his boots on, judging the ground firm enough to stay shod.

Cas had retained various abilities, none of which made any sense or were organized into any kind of pattern, but one of them was he always knew when Dean was coming, so he never bothered to text or call to warn him. Sure enough, Dean had only gotten a few feet from the Impala when he saw the hammock slung underneath the house twisting, and Cas dropped gracefully out of it and started toward him, barefoot.

Dean refused to think about Cas spending every night _outside_ , under his house _,_ in a _hammock_ , being devoured by virus-laden mosquitoes and at the mercy of drunk teenagers with shotguns. _If that’s what he wants_ , he reminded himself. _If this is what makes him happy_. He doesn’t have to wear shoes, he doesn’t have to sleep in a bed, he doesn’t have to—

“Cut his hair,” he said aloud, in disbelief; but he didn’t have time for more than this because Cas had broken into a _run_ and was rushing at him, beaming ear-to-ear. Dean felt his throat swell up and something hit his chest like a wave, but Cas hadn’t even reached him yet, why was he running like that, this wasn’t how they usually—

“ _Dean!_ ” He barely had time to register how hoarse Cas sounded, worse than he remembered, before he was caught up in his arms, too startled to do anything but tighten his own around him in return, instinctively. Cas’s face was buried in his shoulder and he was talking but Dean couldn’t hear anything he was saying, dazed, and he couldn’t seem to stop himself from reaching up automatically with both hands, curling his fists against Cas’s shoulders and trying not to touch anything above or below that point.

Finally Cas pulled back, still saying things but all Dean could feel was the rush of breath across his face, and all he could see was a genuine happiness in Cas’s eyes, a joy he thought he’d maybe never seen before, or only briefly, before it got shattered by some fresh hell. “Your hair,” he managed, and Cas burst out laughing, raking it back.

“I forgot about it until today. I’ve been preparing myself with some of Sam’s best retorts.”

“Yet somehow I only ever heard the lame ones,” Dean tried, and this was apparently convincing, because Cas laughed again ( _what the hell_ ) and backed off a little, enough to let go of Dean, mostly, and frown, and ask about his belongings.

“Get ‘em later,” said Dean, suddenly, inexplicably, lighter. “Show me this ugly beach of yours, that you’re so obsessed with. I wanna see if it’s even more repulsive than last year.”

“On my walk this morning I counted nineteen dead _Physalia physalis_ ,” Cas replied promptly, finally letting go of some part of Dean that he had still been attached to (his jacket? his hand? Dean wasn’t sure) and stepping to one side so they could walk together toward the water.

“Yeah, well if I knew what the fuck those were I might be impressed.” Dean gave up and stopped after a few feet, shucking off his boots, tying the laces together, and tossing them over one shoulder. Cas paused and waited while he pulled off both socks and rolled up his jeans, wincing a little at the cold wet sand.

“The Portuguese man-of-war,” Cas translated, already looking up and down, combing the shoreline. The surf was even dirtier than it had appeared from the seawall, with foamy wavelets bearing weeds and debris.

“Those are bad, right?” Dean tried to remember. “They sting, or bite or something?”

“Sting, but only if you get in their way—although their tentacles can be thirty, fifty, a hundred feet long.” Dean stole a glance over at him and still couldn’t quite wrap his head around the change; he was used to seeing Cas subdued, he now realized, a little muted, even maybe depressed. But today he seemed to be vibrating from within, almost lit internally, his eyes shining. Dean kept half-thinking he was about to grab at his hand and start dragging him toward the ocean like a kid.

“Look, here’s one.” Dean approached cautiously, not sure what to make of the stringy purple-blue tangle, or the shimmering gelatinous bulb at which Cas was currently poking with a stick of driftwood. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“That’s, um, that’s one word for it,” Dean said, bending down to look. The movement released something knotted in him; he shook out his shoulders a little, surreptitiously, and twisted his neck side to side, but ultimately it felt too good to stop. He sighed, dumped his boots on the sand and shrugged out of his jacket and flannel down to his t-shirt, which turned into a full-body stretch and then, when he turned back, Cas was looking at him intently.

“What?” he said, a little defensively. “I didn’t stop for the night, I’m a little stiff, so what.”

Cas smiled again, easily. He kept _doing_ that. “No, that’s not—it’s fine. Look, let me show you.” He used the stick to flip over the jellyfish, saying, “Siphonphores are colonies of organisms, actually, not a single entity—rather the same way that our human bodies are made up of different collections of cells even though we think of ourselves as individuals. So you could say this is its stomach, but really—”

“Hang on,” Dean put both hands up in mock protest. “First of all, what do you mean, _our_ human bodies, kemosabe. And second—we _think_ of ourselves as individuals? Pretty sure there’s just one of me.”

“I doubt the world could handle more than one.”

Dean could’ve sworn Cas just _winked_ at him. He must have imagined that.

Cas dropped the stick and pulled a penknife out of his pocket, using it to show Dean various parts of jellied anatomy, describing how the hundred-foot-long tentacles administered their toxic, and what sounded like incredibly fucking painful, sting.

“I don’t wanna rain on your nerd parade, Cas, but those seem like something you should gank, not get to know intimately. You actually _swim_ with them? In the _water_?”

They’d looped around by this point and were loosely headed toward the house. Despite himself, Dean found his eyes unfocused, scanning the sand, looking for shells. It wasn’t even a decision you made at the beach—just, your eyes wanted to find things. Your hands and eyes and feet took on their own life and kind of left your brain behind. It wasn’t a bad feeling. Dean’s shoulders started to drop, at first incrementally, then a couple of inches all at once when the warmth of Cas’s palm landed on his back, a little too low down to be—

“No, and it’s actually very rare for them this time of year, which I think is why there are so few—in the spring or summer they’ll come all at once, thousands and thousands, and we just stay out of the water then. But I love looking at them; they’re such attractive animals.”

“Attractive, yet lethal. Like Sam,” Dean deadpanned. For the first time since he’d arrived, Cas almost squinted at him, almost with a hint of his old waspishness.

“You’re jealous.”

“What? No,” Dean protested, but it sounded tepid and measly, even to him. “Anyway he’s been seeing this one girl all year—maybe she’ll manage to stay alive long enough to—”

To his horror, Cas had scooped up a large sodden handful of the hideous reddish-brown seaweed, which Dean knew from experience was prickly and covered all over with gross little air bladders, and was advancing steadily toward him with a downright _smitey_ look. 

Dean dropped into fighting stance, appalled, backing away; let his boots and jacket fall to the sand, prepared to defend—whatever part of him Cas was planning to attack.

“Dean, stop making fun of your brother.”

“The fuck, man—I just _got_ here, you haven’t even fed me yet, I drove _seventeen hours_ to see your lazy ass because _somebody_ doesn’t have a car—”

Apparently Cas didn’t care.

•

After a plate of fresh beignets covered in powdered sugar and most of a pot of chicory coffee with half-and-half, Dean felt like he might, _might_ forgive Cas, and said as much, while still scowling and picking bits of seaweed out of his hair.

“Well,” Cas said, unruffled, drying his hands on a dishtowel and handing Dean a large brown envelope, “You shouldn’t make fun of Sam for having lovers. Everyone needs companionship.”

“ _Lovers_ ,” began Dean distastefully, in the back of his mind afraid to ask whether Cas had sought or found such companionship; then, distracted, he turned the envelope over. It was sealed, no writing on the outside, too thick to see through. “What’s this? Did I win?”

“Open it,” said Cas, flopping back down into his deck chair and smiling, this time slowly and thoroughly, over the rim of his coffee cup. All this smiling was starting to do unsettling things to Dean. Or maybe he had an upset stomach. Something. He stuck a finger under one end, tugging at the brad, then looked up and out across the water again.

It was was prettier from up here, from farther away, he thought, or maybe the sky was clearing. The water had an almost blue cast to it, and the whitecaps looked creamy rather than just dirty. Occasionally light even sparkled, fugitive, on the wavelets, as the sun dropped down toward afternoon. He could still see pockets of brown that extended out into the Gulf, though, irregular. He pointed. “Are those where the water’s more shallow, or…?”

Cas stretched his legs out onto the porch railing, crossed at the ankle, sighing contentedly. “Slightly deeper, actually. The silt is from the Mississippi, which, along with the warm temperatures and available nutrients, is part of what makes the Gulf such a rich biosphere, even despite the oil spills, the widening hypoxic zone, and the— _open_ it, Dean.”

He sounded so unusually impatient that, rather than protest, Dean did. He drew out a thick piece of paper, and turned it over to realize he was holding a diploma.

“When did,” he started, then stopped, reading aloud, “ _Be it known that James Castiel Novak_ ”—in the end Charlie had decided that was easiest—“ _having completed the studies and satisfied the requirements for the degree of…_ Master of Science? _…has accordingly been admitted to that degree, with all the honors, rights, and privileges belonging thereunto_.”

He dropped it in his lap, disbelieving, and looked up to see Cas’s eyes dancing.

“Is _this_ why you’re like a cat with a mouthful of feathers? Shit, Cas—how did you do this? You were just in freaking junior college two years ago—”

Cas waved his hand dismissively. “After the first semester made it clear that I didn’t need them, I bypassed the math requirements. As well as chemistry, and—some other things. Plus I didn’t write a thesis, this is just a degree based on coursework, because I thought maybe I might go on to—well. It doesn’t matter right now.”

“But you’re—you have all the honors, rights, and privileges belonging thereunto. Which, okay, sounds a little like some kind of crossroads-demon fine print, or a really bad exorcism, but dude. You’re ahead of Sam! He still has a whole year left to go.”

(Charlie and Dean had gotten more than an earful, the shrill kind where you had to pull the phone away from your head, about the unfairness of Sam having to retake the LSAT and re-apply to law school and the terrible injustice of it all, etc., etc., to the point where they switched off, one taking the call so the other could have a break from the latest updates on the intolerable bureaucratic inefficiencies of large pseudo-Ivy League universities. Neither one wanted to remind him that a few short years ago he’d been addicted to demon blood, not to mention possessed by Lucifer and/or soulless, and thus his admission to any law school, let alone a good one, was a miracle surpassing mortal understanding; so they just put him on speaker phone and took turns making sympathetic noises as one or the other of them fell asleep, channel-surfed with the sound off, made sandwiches, read comic books, or simply stared at each other in disbelief. If Dean laughed at him, a little, sometimes, he promptly forgave himself, because really he was only glad that his brother hadn’t stayed locked in a fucking pit for all eternity, and was instead free to be outraged that he had to pay something called a “continuing education fee” for four semesters of his absence.)

Cas’s eyes suddenly seemed suspiciously bright. “Dammit, come here,” Dean grumbled, shoving out of his chair to—to what, he wasn’t sure. Hug him, he guessed, maybe with some congratulatory back slapping, except Cas was still sprawled in his own deck chair so it turned into something strange, a hybrid of a hug, an ungainly half-shoulder half-neck thing which ended with Cas twisted and basically pressing his face into Dean’s stomach, arms wrapped around his waist. And then, because he did it to Charlie all the time and it seemed so natural, without thinking Dean bent and dropped a kiss onto the top of Cas’s head.

And then froze.

“Okay,” he said, pointlessly, pulling back, one hand braced on Cas’s shoulder. Cas looked up at him through a ridiculous amount of hair, that familiar flush of red across the top of both cheekbones, face stubbled and warm and relaxed, so disarming that Dean followed up this useful segue with, “I’m just,” which indecision proved to be a mistake because Cas only reached out for him and pulled him back in again, and this time Dean truly didn’t know what else to do, so he put his arms back around Cas and then stood there, half bent over, like an idiot, thinking Cas’s hair smelled like seawater, his mind otherwise perfectly blank.

•

Gulls saved him, or both of them, or Dean didn’t know what; but they’d started swooping in to fight over the beignet crusts, so Cas had jumped up to handfeed them, because he was a giant lunatic like that. By that time the sun was slanting lower, and quite warm, and despite the chicory Dean felt himself fading, and he seemed to keep blinking a lot, until finally Cas all but maneuvered him into the one-room house, where it turned out he did in fact still have a bed; and much, much later, when it was quite dark outside, Dean woke to find himself rolled up in the bedspread like a burrito, still wearing all his clothes, but with his belt gone and his pockets emptied of pointy metallic things like keys and buck knife.

“Hey,” he said out across the room, not quite lifting his head, which was on a pillow, and the pillow was smooth and smelled nice, and the sea outside made that calm rushing sound.

There was a slight rustle behind him, and then he _heard_ Cas smile. _Okay, this had stopped being funny and was now really starting to_ —he turned to say something pithy and accusatory but stopped when he realized Cas was hardly a foot away, stretched out on the other side of the bed, propped up and reading from a tablet in the dark, the faint light of it barely illuminating his face. “Hello, Dean,” he said, without looking up; but yes, he was smiling.

“Why,” said Dean thickly, clearing his throat, “do you keep fucking smiling.”

“Did I not smile before?” Cas asked, apparently serious, putting down the tablet and taking a box of wooden matches from the nightstand drawer. He lit a kerosene lamp, settling the glass globe carefully back on its prongs before shaking out the match and turning the wick up slowly, until Dean could see his face clearly.

“Not all the goddamn time,” Dean said. Suddenly it seemed hard to remember the other Cas. “Or with half your mouth, but only sometimes. But kind of sad, too.”

“I felt sad,” Cas said, shrugging one shoulder. That was something else Dean had never seen. “I’m okay now.”

“How can you be, after everything,” and Dean wasn’t exactly sure where he was going with this but only half of his brain was awake and the other was oddly focused on the fact that Cas’s shirt was unbuttoned most of the way, and the obvious thing to do seemed to be to scoot the rest of the way over and put his arm around Cas, and press his face against him.

He wasn’t sure whether he’d done it or just imagined it, and seemed to have fallen asleep again, because when he woke a second time, Cas had slid down in the bed so that their eyes were on a level, and rolled onto his side to face Dean.

“I told you, Dean: I needed it to be quiet,” he said. “That’s all I needed, to start to be okay. That and I needed to do some work, good work, work besides taking orders and killing.” 

This was a more familiar Cas, eyes boring into his, unblinking, scanning Dean’s face for whatever it was he always seemed to be looking for; but then it stopped being like anything that had ever happened to them, because Cas reached out calmly, as if it were something he did every day, and started running his fingers through Dean’s hair.

He fought to keep his eyes open, but they fluttered shut, until with reflexes he forgot he had, his right hand shot up and clamped around Cas’s wrist, and they stayed there like that, not moving, until both halves of Dean’s brain cooperated and he sat up, still holding Cas by the wrist.

Cas sat up too. He didn’t try to pull away. His throat and collarbones were tan, in the white shirt. His mouth was open, a little, and they sat there, and the kerosene lamp flickered.

“You can’t just,” Dean began, but apparently since leaving the ferry his new thing was being unable to finish sentences, or, technically, even to get them properly started.

“It was never about you, Dean,” Cas said, so far unaffected by the sentence-wrecking curse. “I never wanted to leave. But I was so broken, and it wasn’t anything that was going to heal as long as I kept—as long as there was so much talking. I couldn’t do both things at once.”

Since he couldn’t say anything, Dean thought he might as well listen. He nodded dumbly.

“I finally started getting better at the monastery. I’d known how to meditate before, obviously; but since I’d never actually needed to breathe, I’d never spent time watching my breath, just being with it, being inside a mind, a body. The techniques are more than just…part of the lore. Sitting and attending to whatever comes up—it became experiential, felt. When you live for weeks in silence, holding still, eventually all the noise in your head dies down and everything gets very clear. Like water without any disturbance.”

Cas’s wrist felt supple and hot in the circle of his fingers, but if Dean let go of it, Cas might touch him again. He should probably grab the other wrist too. But Cas wasn’t moving, just sitting cross-legged and looking at him like—Dean didn’t know what. Like he was on fire. That didn’t make any sense. He released Cas’s wrist without noticing and their palms slid together; Cas made an almost inaudible sound and slipped his fingers through Dean’s, interweaving them like it made sense for him to do that, gripping his hand tightly.

There was either too much noise in his head or not enough. Or it was the ocean, outside, never ceasing, never turned off, it stayed on all night, making its soft crushed sounds.

“I didn’t want to go—I didn’t want to be without you, _ever_. And now that I know how to be inside myself, I can carry that with me. And bring my whole self to where I am—to people, to every being I care about.” His voice fell so low Dean could hardly hear him. “To you.”

Desperate, Dean thought he should try one more time to say something, so he swallowed; but then made the mistake of looking down at their fingers. Cas brought up his other hand, and held Dean’s hand between both of his, tenderly, as if Dean mattered, then unashamedly bent his head and kissed the back of it, his battered knuckles; turned it over and kissed his stupid scarred palm, and the inside of his wrist, and Dean’s eyes prickled and he was damned if he was going to just sit here and _let_ Cas _say_ these things and not—

He stood up, tugging. “Come on.” Apparently when he lurched into movement, his voice came back, but only temporarily. “Outside,” he got out, before it shut down again.

Cas had never been one to ask dumb questions. “The temperature has dropped,” he warned, but he reached behind himself with one hand, twisted down the wick until the lamp guttered, and then let Dean pull him off the bed by the other, toward the screen door. 

Outside on the balcony, Dean drew in a few long gulping breaths of what was, as promised, really cold air. He shook his head to clear it, rubbed his face awake. After a moment he noticed Cas’s fingers were still interlaced with his and neither of them were letting go, as they leaned on the railing out over the tidal flats below. He was still in just a t-shirt and Cas was in his cotton button-down, that seemed more unbuttoned than not, and they were both shivering. The moon had a bone-white ring of ice crystals around it, and was close enough to full that he could see Cas biting down on his lower lip, and could see his eyes, which had never been truly afraid of anything and still weren’t, not even afraid of Dean telling him no.

 _You should be afraid_ , Dean wanted to say, _because I am. You shouldn’t give yourself like this. You can’t just_ smile _at me that way, like I’m something that could bring you joy, like you—_

He knew when he was beaten. He’d given up hours ago, gave up the moment Cas had come running across the sand toward him, ready to leap, shining with trust, so he just continued that movement, pulled Cas back against him, now, and Cas came into his arms again like he’d been all but waiting for it, as easy as melting.

They stood there for another forty years of Dean’s life, arms tight around each other, trembling. “Dean,” Cas said finally, voice filled with yearning. “It’s too goddamned cold.”

“You,” Dean said, “are right.” And just like that, the curse was lifted; Dean knew exactly how to handle even a situation as unprecedented as this one. “Where,” he continued fluently, almost like a person who regularly spoke a language, “are the alcohols of your people?”

•

It was after midnight when they found their way back onto the bed, and this time the bed was in a different place, not least because after half-a-dozen shots and not very much dinner (they were too nervous to eat, or had forgotten how), Dean had stumbled against it and made it skid a couple of feet south. But everything had also moved because most of the shots had been drunk in some configuration of holding hands or with arms around shoulders or waists, or even, once, daringly, a sort of ungainly lap-dance moment, until Cas started laughing and Dean had gotten huffy and slid off and poured another round.

“You terrify me more as a human than as a goddamned angel, you know that,” he slurred, from what was now apparently his side of the bed.

Cas was back on his own side facing him, propped up on his elbow, once again running his free hand through Dean’s hair with absolutely no fucking sense of propriety at all.

“I think you scare yourself,” he said without hesitation, and Dean sort of hated him.

“Why aren’t you more drunk?”

Cas smiled the old smile, the half-sided one, equal parts fond and sad. “I don’t know. Some things I kept and some I didn’t. I hardly ever drink, but when I do, it doesn’t affect me much. You on the other hand—I gather being elderly really does make your tolerance go down?”

“Fuck you, you’re older than vertebrates,” Dean volunteered, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Cas chose that moment to alternate combing through his hair with a sharp tug at the ends, and Dean dissolved, a sensation Cas further exacerbated by suddenly moving forward to put his head on the pillow next to Dean's, and to slide his other hand underneath Dean’s cheek. They were lying so closely together now Dean could feel Cas’s breath across his upper lip.

His heart stopped beating. “Cas, there’s no way you want this. I’m a dude.”

“That,” his former best friend said quietly, meeting his eyes, still cupping his cheek, one thumb grazing over his lower lip, “is kind of the point, for me.”

Dean’s mouth opened a little, and when Cas’s thumb slipped inside he bit it, once, sharply, to see if it would make him gasp. It did. “Can angels be gay?”

“Angels can be anything, just like humans; I’m human. I identify as male. And I’ve wanted to touch you, Dean Winchester, for years. As long as I’ve been here. Forever.”

“You have a master’s degree,” Dean pointed out, breathlessly.

“You have a GED and a give-’em-hell attitude,” Cas agreed.

“I shoot guns. I beat up monsters. I fix _cars_ , Cas.”

“I guess I should have done something worse to yours than hide the distributor cap, then.”

Had Cas always had eyes this dark? Had his mouth always been magnetically soft and alluring? Had an artery always throbbed in his throat like that, begging to be sucked?

Beneath everything that slow susurrus, a constant rushing wash of sound, waves crashing onto the beach and dragging out again on the diagonal; undertow, riptide. Dean knew how to swim, he was a strong swimmer. He just needed to stop thinking this ocean should be more like some other ocean, when this was the ocean here right now in front of him.

When this one was warm and inviting and sun-browned and held him like a cup.

“Oh my god, _Cas_ ,” and then his hands went around Cas’s face too, stubble rough on his fingertips and their mouths were—he drew back long enough to mutter “ _fuck,_ ” and then there was a brief sorting-out moment, lips and tongues making some kind of decision as to how this was going to go, and then that too fell away as Cas just coursed on top of him like a liquid, where he clearly had been supposed to be for a really long time, and Dean opened on the next pulse and let him in. It was a kiss that vacated spaces in his head and filled other places with flashing colored lights and mostly it just felt really, really fucking incredible, to have Cas finally licking into his mouth, sliding hot and wet into him and delicately tracing a pattern against his soft palate and then, with a soft hitch and a shudder, fisting his hands into Dean’s t-shirt and just fucking his mouth with his tongue until Dean thought he might either come or faint or burst into tears or maybe just die—

—but what it turned out he did, apparently, when he was really overwhelmed and turned on and, face it, totally in love, was flip Cas over and do the same thing to him. Which worked. And made Cas writhe underneath him, with some very distracting hip thrusts, but Dean was not about to be deterred from his mission of kissing Cas thoroughly enough to make him understand what it was like; and when he finally pulled back, and Cas let out a sob, and tried to chase his face upward in the dark, Dean felt that had been accomplished.

“ _Dean_ ,” Cas pleaded; and Dean was right back to feeling like he might die. 

“I know, baby, I know,” is all he could get out before Cas was back on top of him again, this time not just plundering his mouth but clawing for the edge of his t-shirt and Dean helped, and then Cas’s shirt, and now it was warm skin against skin and almost too much except it needed to be more, a lot more, really quickly; so it turned out he didn't know, not at all. “Jesus fuck, I had no _fucking_ idea,” Dean swore, his voice shaking, and now Cas couldn’t speak, his eyes enormous in the dark, and it turned out that Cas had really exquisitely sensitive skin all over his chest, but especially his nipples, and when Dean bit the side of his neck and then his trapezius, Cas’s entire body went rigid and for a second Dean thought that would be it for a while, that they’d have to drink water and make out and doze and come back to it after he recovered, but then Cas just made a kind of snarling sound and ripped open Dean’s fly like it had done him a personal disservice.

Cas’s pants had some stupid hippie drawstring which meant that it was only a matter of seconds before Dean had both hands down them, one kneading the high tight muscles of his ass, the other discovering that Cas didn’t wear underwear and had shaved his pubic hair at some point, and it was growing back but was still short and kind of sleek, which somehow made up Dean’s mind and without his being quite aware of how it had happened, Cas was arching up beneath him, the pants were on the floor, and Dean’s mouth was without a doubt on another man’s cock and it was the best thing to happen so far tonight, maybe for a really long time. He drew the head between his lips, pulling gently, nibbling a little, suckling, teasing at the slit with his tongue, and already had to hold Cas down with both hands. One of Cas’s hands wound up on the back of his neck, nails digging helplessly into the skin; the other he had clenched into his own long hair, and he was cursing a blue streak that Dean thought he was going to have to give him unmitigated shit about, later.

“Motherfucking goddammit son of a—Dean, _wait_ , are you sure, you don’t have to, it’s—”

“Would you _stop talking_ ,” Dean said, muffled, and lunged up far enough to slap his free hand over Cas’s mouth (which was its own kind of thing, he would remember that). When he skimmed back down, his own mouth still open, the movement carried him back into his previous activity and this time he just slid down as far as he could, as wetly as possible, stroking, making his mouth be what he liked, hot and tight, and his nose was running but my god he _wanted_ this, not least for the indescribable noises Cas made, this ridiculous fucking “I’m not people” angel that he, fuck, _wanted_ , that he’d wanted for so long he didn’t even know, it had become something lodged under his skin for so many years he thought feeling it there was just a part of the whole mess, having to wake up and be alive and move around and do stuff and then finally get to be unconscious again, as though part of the texture of life were just this unmoving lump under the skin, next to the bone, of _wanting_ and not having; when he could have had, and let that part of the pain go.

He was so devastated by this realization, so angry and wild, that his movements grew faster and harder and he didn’t stop to think about it or whether he should or what it might be called, he just held Cas down and made love to him without mercy until he screamed, “ _Yes_ , Dean, _please_ , please don’t stop, please,” and he had no intention of stopping, he sped up and held on, went down and stayed, worked his fingers into Cas’s glutes until he knew there would be bruises for a month, scraped the underside with his teeth, swiveled and sucked, drew it out until just that moment when he distantly felt Cas’s shins digging into his sides and fingers twisting in his hair, but the wrench of it only made him want _more_ and he started swallowing, sort of abstractly, because there wasn’t anything to swallow except his own saliva and frustration with himself for not doing this a goddamned _decade_ ago and then suddenly _there_ it was: under his hands Cas’s body seized, went taut like a bowstring, and Dean half expected blue light to pour out when instead a long hoarse cry left him. Dean’s mouth was flooded with the ocean, it was warm and salt and tears sprang into his eyes and he clung on for dear life, Cas’s hips shuddering and thrusting and Dean just adhering, not about to be shaken off, not for nothing, you are not getting rid of me, _I will not let thee go except thou bless me_.

When Cas started to whimper and make flappy passes at him with a useless hand, Dean let him go, oversensitive, stroked and gentled his way up to Cas’s mouth where Cas, face wet, dragged a fist into the hair at the nape of Dean’s neck and kissed him with a savagery that was one part gratitude, one part ongoing unabated need, and one part pitiless triumph. “Dean Winchester,” he hissed, flipped them over again, “You _deserve_ this—” before tearing his jeans down to his knees along with his boxer briefs, not bothering to take either all the way off because there wasn’t any time because his cock was already down Cas's throat and he’d let out a guttural shout he couldn’t remember ever making before, and instead of holding him still, Cas was licking back up the shaft, sliding off with a slick sound and saying, rough and urgent, “Just _fuck me_ , Dean, don’t make me beg for it, please fuck my mouth—”

They wound up on their sides, Dean half-crying out with every thrust, Cas with both arms slung around his ass groaning and just somehow taking it, Dean had no idea how, deeper every time, pulling back only once, to entwine his fingers with Dean’s, pulling one hand away from where it was all but ripping holes in the sheets, hauling it to the back of his head and _putting_ it there, hard, shoving, until Dean finally understood and then tangled both hands in Cas’s long fucking hair and just gave up, just gave it up and took him. At one point Cas was underneath him somehow, and then at another point on the floor between his knees, which meant his goddamned jeans finally came off and also that Cas was grinding two knuckles into the pocket of sweet tender skin behind his junk, which was scarily good, and then finally Cas was back on top of him but still just eating him alive and every time he swallowed around Dean’s cock he thought it was over, but it wasn’t, until he felt one of Cas’s hands unfurl quietly along the inside of his thigh, thumb stroking gently into the crease of his groin, pressing against it, and while Cas’s mouth and throat were fucking him relentlessly, the tenderness of those fingertips drawing skillful, subtle circles against the back of one knee was too much, was the end for him, and all the breath went out of him in a rush and all the light washed out of everything, he tried not to use words but could never control his mouth, what it said and what it didn’t and when, and so somewhere in there were things like _baby_ and _please_ and _why_ and _shit, the way you suck me,_ and probably almost certainly _goddammit Castiel I fucking love you_.

When he drifted back up onto the sand at last, washed ragged onto shore, Cas lay curled against his hip, shivering, and Dean wasn’t having that, he hauled him all the way up and hid his face in the side of Cas’s neck, and they breathed together, damp and raw, until Dean made a single curt sound that meant, _I’ll go on a Zen retreat with you for a year and I won’t say a word, but your body is never leaving mine again_.

“I thought I might apply to vet school in Kansas,” Cas said, almost inaudibly hoarse.

“Don’t you want to study sea turtles though, or plankton,” Dean said, shocked that they were having a normal conversation, except for the part where they were both stark naked, covered in sweat, and had swallowed what had felt at the time like a lot of come.

There was a long moment during which he figured Cas had fallen asleep. “It’ll work out,” he said, finally, then swung to the floor for the sheets and bedspread, pulling them up behind him and leaving a trail of peppered kisses on the way back, including one chaste peck on Dean’s dick.

“Did you just,” said Dean wonderingly.

“No,” Cas whispered, and snuggled—there wasn’t any other word for it—close against him as the room grew cold around them.

“Dude, what’s up with your voice,” Dean said, worried. “You always sound like a three-pack-a-day guy, but I’ve never heard you like this.”

“Well, just _now_ I may have swallowed a reasonably sized d—”

“No—very funny; and no.” (This was Cas, now. Cas gave head and then made sex jokes. Dean just went with it.) “I mean from when I got here. You know what I mean.”

“I was sick, in the fall. I had laryngitis, and afterward the doctor—they referred me to a specialist—she said I had permanent vocal cord paralysis." They were silent a moment, Dean giving in to the silky length of Cas's hair as he carded through it, untangling it carefully. He thought about burnt-out eyes and bleeding ears, about how most angels were either killed in their vessels or left them. Cas had been embodied so long, even before he fell, longer than any other non-archangel. What kind of toll had that taken on him physically? Dean fought back a surge of protectiveness, forced himself to keep stroking without pause.

Cas yawned. "Incidentally, this same damage to my larynx is also why I don’t really have a gag reflex.”

Dean had started absently massaging his neck and upper back, hard, digging thumbs into the shoulder muscles as Cas leaned into it, but he stopped at this. “Cas, that can’t be good.”

He laughed, and it sounded dangerously like a wheeze. “It’s not. I tend to choke easily, and am increasingly vulnerable to respiratory infections. It’ll get worse, probably.”

Dean said nothing, thinking only very fiercely to himself that he would make sure there were a variety of other less damaging ways that all the things that had just happened to them would happen again, and regularly, but without making Cas sound like he’d just swallowed a Brillo pad. He went back to massaging Cas’s neck and shoulders, but more drowsily, soothed by the slush and rush of the tide going out, the smell of salt, of safety.

“Can’t go back to Kansas, man. No ocean there. This thing is better than headphones.”

“I knew them once, you know. The ocean gods,” Cas said, muffled against his armpit.

Dean nodded sleepily. “That’s because you’re an old man. With all the honors, rights, and privileges belonging thereunto.” Which apparently now included blowjobs.

“Oceanus and Tethys—they were brother and sister. But also consorts.”

“Sounds about right, for gods. They’re fucked-up that way.” A breath. Dean smoothed the hair back from Cas’s forehead, waiting. “What happened to them?”

Cas sighed and then started wrestling with the covers in some way Dean couldn’t figure out, kicking and struggling. “They’re dead, of course. Yemayá would never let this hypoxic zone in the Gulf keep _growing_ , it’s not even, I don’t know why we can’t just stop the—”

“Hey, hey, come on, babe, shhh, it’s okay,” Dean got the sheet and bedspread away from him long enough to tuck them securely around them both, and pull Cas back against his chest. “Don’t, okay. Just—don’t. We’ll fix it tomorrow.”

Cas laughed against him, in a not entirely pleasant way. “Yes, Dean, certainly, the two of us will find a way to fix the largest oxygen-deprived zone known to modern scien—”

He now knew a very good way to shut Cas up, and planned to use it whenever necessary. Cas’s mouth was warm and pliant and he didn’t kick up any more fuss after that.

“I want to swim with you,” Dean said, after Cas had yielded, and discarded whatever he’d thought was so important a moment ago. “In that junky germy water you love so much.”

“So warm, Dean,” said Cas, his syllables starting to fall apart into mush. “In the right season. Like being in a bath. You can swim? You didn’t swim, I never see you. Swim?”

“I know one stroke,” Dean said, shouldering Cas over onto his side and aggressively spooning him (no way is he going to be the little spoon on the first damn night) (if he wakes up in the morning that way, he’ll be okay with it, because by then it won’t be night anymore). “I only ever learned one, because one is all you need in an emergency, to go fast over a short distance, for a rescue or to get to safety. And I’m good at it, and it works.”

“You can do the crawl,” Cas decided, pulling Dean’s arm more tightly around himself.

“Yeah,” he said, a little shakily, a little bit grim, until he settled himself by leaning forward to kiss the back of Cas’s neck, right underneath the ear. “When I have to. When there’s nothing else to do but that. I can crawl.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you know her work, you can tell that my writing's been ruined by [seperis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis), whose utterly infectious [_Down to Agincourt_](http://archiveofourown.org/series/110651) has virally colonized my brain (and you should let that happen to yours, and [here's why](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com/post/115999667391/down-to-agincourt-500-k-words)).
> 
> This fic owes an even greater debt to [catchclaw's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw) brilliant, must-read "[Still Life](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2796962)"—I’d say mine is an homage to hers, except it turned out disconcertingly close to a flat-out rip-off, thanks in part to the fact that I only know one beach in the entire world, and it's on Galveston Island.
> 
> Also thanks to attentive, patient betas [bettydays](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sadrobots/works), [kitt3nz](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kitt3nz), and [shiphitsthefan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shiphitsthefan/pseuds/shiphitsthefan); who did all the wonderful things they always do, not least interjecting shouts like "GOD BLESS AMERICA" at just the right moment in addition to trying to iron out my ridiculous prose.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com) and [twitter](http://twitter.com/jsalowe), like a tool. Come find me, let's be weird internet friends.
> 
> Oh and here's a [pretty beachy gifspam](http://bert-and-ernie-are-gay.tumblr.com/post/123186048621/crawl) if you wanna reblog on tumblr, as one does.
> 
> For the leftenant, because shut up and eat the fucking brownie.


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